Buffalo Bulls Football: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly versus Boston College

Lance Leipold and his Buffalo Bulls enter conference play in an interesting situation. Buffalo now sits 1-3 after their most recent showing against Boston College in which the Bulls were routed 35-3. Without further ado, here’s this week’s look at what went wrong and what went right:

The Good

Kyle DeWeen-

One thing is for certain: UB’s punting game is just about as good as last year with DeWeen at the helm. The punter averaged 45 yards per punt and pinned the Eagles back in the 20 twice yet again. Add in the fact that DeWeen managed this effort in the pouring rain is even better. For the second game of the year, I give MVP accolades to our punter.

The Defense-

Hear me out. I honestly think the defense did their job this week. The Bulls forced two fumbles, 10 tackles for a loss, and 2 sacks on the day. This all sounds good to me and it can easily be overshadowed by the fact they gave up 35 points. To be quite honest, I don’t think giving up 35 points is all on them. When you have an offense that generates less than a hundred yards for the whole game, the defense is going to get gassed. They looked strong in the first quarter and I refuse to let one of the best defensive performances this season go overlooked.

Khalil Hodge-

Time to pound this drum: Hodge is one of the biggest strengths of this year’s defense. His last three games have proven that he’s a threat at middle linebacker. All I need to do is leave you with this:

The Bad

Boise Ross’s draft stock-

I’m sorry but it’s time to circle this wagon. I will happily eat crow if I’m proved wrong but I don’t think Boise Ross gets drafted into the NFL this year. He had a wonderful season last year but I have only seen regression. You can always make the argument that this was his first full game of the season but Ross only had two tackles and not a single pass breakup on the day.

Ross has the physical attributes and the strong ability to defend the pass, but the last two years he has yet to show the ability to defend the run. Without that, I think Ross goes from a fourth round draft pick to an undrafted free agent that gets cut before the season starts.

The Ugly

Hello offense, my old friend-

The offense was on my good side last week but it didn’t seem to exist last week and the play calling looked a little different than when they played Army. The run game was quickly abandoned, which is a sorry sight to see. I said in Bulls and Beers I didn’t care how poorly the offense played, I did not want to see the run game be abandoned. Early in the going UB was making passing plays but failed to try and open up the running game with it after a few tries of being bottled up by BC’s defensive line. What continues to be frustrating is despite the inability to run through the line, there were rarely wide runs to get around it.